“You’re going to have to do better than the goatshit you’re passing off as intel,” Dante said, a bit pissed, feeling jetlagged. “We have ransom money to deliver. Money for lives. So what else can you agency pukes tell us about the second hijacked ship? The container vessel—”
“Shining Sea,” injected the CIA case officer.
“Affirmative. Where’s she now?”
“Offshore in Zeila, the ancient city across the border in Somaliland,” the case officer said. “Not far from here.”
“Good. And the supertanker sits idle in Berbera, affirmative?” Dante pressed.
“Yes,” said the other CIA agent, who was an Asian American with a boyish face.
“We’re not delivering ransom money for the ships,” Fuller said, unhappy with the dentist approach of pulling teeth to extract answers from their agency counterparties.
“The warlord Korfa, where’s he? Have you set up an open line to com with him for ongoing talks?” Dante asked.
“Uh, we don’t know,” said the case officer with a shrug.
“Great. What else are you holding back? It’s what we need to know before we cross the border into pirate country,” Dante griped, standing up. He flexed the pecs on his barrel chest. At first, they didn’t answer. “Fuller, give me the Satcom.” Fuller handed the Satcom to Dante. He keyed in a password, entered a code, and connected direct to Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida. “This is former SEAL Team Six Dante Dawson of Azure Shell calling the DCI rep of the 1st Special Forces Op Detachment Delta.”
“Okay, okay.” The Asian American agent waved his hands to end the call. “Do not call Delta Force.”
“Sure. You were saying?”
“We don’t know where Korfa is. But we do know his brother was shot dead on board the tanker, with his body brought to a compound along the Sheikh Pass. A SEAL tailed Korfa into Berbera, but he lost him in the port city.”
“Keep going.”
“We got word from the SEAL that our asset, codenamed Nairobi, disappeared with the Ferryman,” he explained.
“And…?” Fuller patted the kid agent on the shoulder.
“There’s a plane from Syria en route today to Hargeisa Airport. We believe there’s a connection between the Somali hijackings and the regime in Syria,” he explained.
“Roger that. It’s called blood money,” Fuller said, dripping with sarcasm.
“Two for two. What other details could we use to save our lives and the butts of the hostages?” Dante asked, staring hard at the Asian American agent.
“There’s one more,” the case officer said. “US navy dolphins just recorded what looks like bombs attached to the hull of the tanker run aground in Berbera.”
“Jesus, man, my old pupil… Merk Toten on the scene?” Dante said with a broad grin. “Damn. Has the CIA or navy intel confirmed whether the objects are bombs?”
“Not yet. The DIA is working on it with a squad of SEAL EOD divers in Coronado.”
“Explosive ordnance divers,” Dante said, nodding to Fuller. He turned to the case officer, asking, “What’s our best entry point into Somaliland? Zeila, Berbera… or the airport?”
After a long silence, the Asian American agent replied, “The airport in Somaliland. It’s inland, but that’s probably where the hostages were taken. We are retasking the one drone we have for Zeila to get first reports on the hijacked container ship.”
“The State Department will put a call into the government in Hargeisa, requesting to open a line of talks between you and the pirates,” the case officer said.
“Got it. You better not be missing any more details,” Dante said, pointing a finger at the agent. “What we learn, we’ll com through Langley, not you.”
Chapter Forty-Five
The Black Hawk helicopter lifted off from Camp Lemonnier. It banked north out over the Bab-al-Mandab Strait, the “Gate of Grief,” so named for the dangers it posed to sailors, captains, and cargo ships alike on navigating the narrows.
The Azure Shell hostage negotiators, Dante Dawson and Chris Fuller, peered out the cockpit window. The southwestern corner of Yemen sat across the waters, on the other side the mouth of the Red Sea, with rugged mountains rising above a barren strip of desert.
Ignoring the CIA’s guidance to fly directly to Hargeisa Airport, Dante called his “sea daddy,” four-star admiral Quail Sumner, at the Pentagon to receive clearance to fly over Zeila and inspect the hijacked container ship, Shining Star, from the air. He then clicked open a photo gallery on a tablet and swiped pictures taken of the Kenyan CIA asset Nairobi exiting the compound with Korfa; aerial drone photos of the listing tanker Blå Himmel; and underwater dorsalcam shots of the two planted devices on the ship’s starboard hull. The bombs looked real enough. He passed the tablet to Fuller to get his take as an ex-FBI counterterrorism specialist.
The copilot glanced back at the Azure Shell team, asking, “Hey, Dawson, how many hostage negotiations have you guys pulled off?”
“Six,” Dante replied.
“Make that eight,” Fuller said.
“How many together?” the copilot asked.
“Did he say successful?… Uh, three,” Fuller said.
“We handled a few million. But who’s counting when you’re talking about lives saved,” the former CO said. “We did lose two hostages when a teen pirate fired due to frayed nerves. The kid was a rookie. But hell, the gunfire did change the tempo of the negotiations after that.”
“Did it make you nervous?” the pilot asked.
“When you’re unarmed, middle of an empty desert with a drone, maybe, hovering in the sky covering your hind flank, sure, we perspired a bit,” Dante said.
Fuller pulled up video clip interviews with the Blå Himmel mercenary, Peder Olsen, who had been transferred from the USS New York to the US forward base on Socotra Island, off the Horn of Africa, where the US military had been building up forces on that island and Masriah Island, off the coast of Oman, to counter the Somali piracy and prepare for a clash with Iran.
The massive buildup began in early 2012. It was born out of Iran’s nuclear program and military threats to close the Persian Gulf, including the ISIS invasion of Iraq two years later. What Fuller found odd was that the USS New York flew Olsen to the US military base on Socotra and not the NATO counter-piracy base. Also left out of the ongoing negotiations with Somali pirates for the release of the two ships’ crews was United Kingdom’s Piracy Ransom Task Force, which didn’t exactly bother Dante Dawson or Fuller — their absence would make the duo richer. But it did make him wonder, why deliver Olsen there instead to the anti-pirate fusion center, which was established for NATO’s Gulf of Aden Operation Ocean Shield — OOS — initiative?
Curious, Fuller accessed the OOS Somali dhow database through the global NATO Shipping Center, NSC. He opened both the Reuters AIS ship tracking system and the NSC weekly pirate report. But he didn’t find much, other than the dates and names of the hijacked ships. The dhow database wasn’t much help either. So he went back to the CIA Somali pirate database and accessed drone photos of the Norwegian supertanker, a schematic showing where Peder Olsen was — on the stern roof of the bridge — when he shot and killed the pirate leader Samatar 300 meters across the tanker at the bow of the ship. As an FBI and SWAT team sniper, Fuller wondered why Olsen decided to take that shot. Was that the only target he fired on the bow?